The James Kettle Moment #4: Dunkirk & Leaving Your Kids In A Harvester

The awesome sacrifice made by so many gallant men at Dunkirk — all in the service of their country — should give us all pause for thought, even when one has just returned home from drinking a couple of mid-morning pints in the Harvester at Brent Cross only to be informed by one’s wife that one has left one’s two children behind in the aforementioned hostelry.
One immediately realises from the ensuing frenzied behaviour and angry words of one’s wife, how easy it is to become obsessively focused on the minor details of one’s everyday concerns — for example, the desirability of stranding two unaccompanied children on licensed premises — and how one should never forget the far greater problems experienced by all those who fought their way bravely out of Normandy and are now commemorated by Christopher Nolan’s excellent film.
When one is repeatedly asked mundane and trivial questions by one’s wife — “What were you thinking?” “When is this going to end?” “What kind of father are you?” — one is reminded how far such considerations were from the minds of those marooned on those exposed French shorelines, desperately seeking shelter as the shells rained down.
And when one’s failure to adequately answer those questions leads one’s wife to start pummeling one’s chest with her fists — irritatingly, causing a spillage in the glass of 8.7% beer one is by now once again holding — it’s impossible not to reflect on how puny these struggles are compared to the almighty physical fortitude shown by those headstrong volunteers on the Kent coast who took to the waves in small boats and dinghies, determined to expend every last drop of energy in rescuing as many of their fellow countrymen as they possibly could.
It’s remarkable that nearly eighty years after the events of Dunkirk, it still exerts such a resonant power on our daily lives and dwarfs their silly inconsequential concerns. To the point that when one’s wife tells you she is first going to retrieve the children, then make arrangements for all three of them to leave one’s life forever, all one can do is consider how much easier it is for one’s wife to leave one than it was for the British Expeditionary Force to leave the field of conflict in those harrowing days of June 1940. A salutary tale.
